The
Supreme Bureaucrats’ Decision on ObamaCare
by
Scott
Lazarowitz
Recently
by Scott Lazarowitz: Can
America’s Descent Possibly Be Reversed?
No, the U.S.
Supreme Court’s decision
on ObamaCare and the individual mandate will not matter, especially
when, as protected by the Tenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the states have a right
to nullify the individual mandate – or all of ObamaCare if they
want to.
The statists
who rule over us, and their apparatchiks and propagandists, want
to assert that the "Civil War settled everything" on issues
of nullification
and state
secession. Those authoritarians suggest that President Abe Lincoln’s
U.S. government war on the seceding states "settled" the
states’ (and their individual inhabitants’) attempts at independence
and the freedom to exercise their right to self-determination and
the right to control their own lives.
The statists
say that the federal government is supreme and the entire population
must obey the will of our high-and-mighty federal rulers. But such
an assertion goes against the principles of the American Revolutionaries.
Economic Historian
Thomas Woods addressed these issues in his book, Nullification:
How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
In an article that appeared last year, Woods addressed
specific points made by the critics of nullification.
Of course
people have a right to buy or to not buy health insurance. And yes,
that right to choose is just as inherent and God-given a right as
are the rights to self-defense and free speech. Just because the
Bill of Rights does not list such a right to choose to buy or not
to buy health insurance does not mean that such a choice is not
a right.
The Bill of
Rights could not possibly enumerate all the rights we as individual
human beings have, or such a list would never end. This was addressed
by the Ninth
Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which states: "The enumeration
in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to
deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Some people
believe that the federal government is empowered to tell the people
what to do, and that federal bureaucrats are our bosses. But the
reverse is true. The states had formed the federal government as
an agent to act on behalf of the states’ interests. The federal
government is employed by the people of the states. The people
of the states are the federal government’s boss.
And it was
especially Lincoln’s war against the people that reinforced the
reversal of that original relationship into a centralized, federal
dictatorship. President Barack Obama’s communist-like recent Executive
Order to seize all of America’s resources, including food, agriculture,
water and labor resources during non-emergency peacetime was a huge
step further down America’s
descent into totalitarian tyranny.
Obama’s recent
Executive Order – in addition to Obama’s command that all Americans
must buy health insurance – was just the most recent in a long list
of federal power-grabs since Lincoln’s War on Independence. Here
are just a couple more examples:
- The order
via legal tender
laws that all Americans must use only U.S. government-issued
currency as their sole medium of exchange. And this despite the
fact that the Federal
Reserve‘s central planning manipulators
have distorted prices, caused massive swings in the business cycle,
caused constantly high unemployment levels, and devalued the dollar
and its purchasing power. Such authoritarian dictatorial policies
have greatly diminished freedom and enhanced the bureaucrats’
power to steal from
us poor slobs.
- The order
that all Americans must participate in the federal government-run
retirement scheme known as Social
Security, against the will and better judgment of individuals.
The promises made by the government could not possibly be kept
in such an inherently flawed and treacherous scheme. It is immoral
for anyone to interfere with an
individual’s right to save, spend or invest one’s earnings
or wealth however one wants.
Regarding the
Supreme Court, just how has this gang of nine protected our liberty
or our rights (particularly, as noted in the American Declaration
of Independence, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness)?
Just recently
the Supreme Bureaucrats approved
of police strip-searching arrestees of minor technical violations
such as parking tickets and so forth. In a typical judicial
monopoly departure of common sense and in statist loyalty to
police power, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted
that "people detained for minor offenses can turn out to
be the most devious and dangerous criminals." Obviously, Kennedy
isn’t aware of how local police neanderthals are known to arrest
as many civilians as they can in the name of revenue collection
quotas (and for jailer pervs to get off on power trips strip-searching
innocent people).
In his apparent
love for the TSA and his reference to all Americans as potential
terrorists, Justice Kennedy went on to state that, "One of
the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was stopped and
ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93."
Hmmm. So we therefore better let the police strip-search Grandma
or some teenager on her way to a part-time job, to use Kennedy’s
obediently childlike reasoning.
And last year,
in an
8-1 decision, the Supreme Bureaucrats approved of police criminally
breaking into private property, and without a warrant, based on
an officer’s belief that residents are flushing marijuana down the
toilet ("destroying evidence"). "Oooo, someone has
marijuana in his own home, we better break in and get him!"
This decision shows just how much government schooling has influenced
even the highest public officials in the land.
The common
sense opinion by Justices would be to nullify the
actual law that police are illegally trying to enforce, such
as laws against harmless and victimless
drug possession. And this common sense approach should apply to
the Court’s decision on ObamaCare as well.
I am assuming
that a President Ron Paul’s Supreme Court Justices would not only
strike down bad laws or policies such as ObamaCare based on violations
of particular Constitutional protections, but that they would also
outright nullify bad laws based on common sense, the Constitution
notwithstanding.
After all,
the U.S. Constitution itself has been a flawed
document from the beginning, and the product of Hamiltonian
centralists who got the Leviathan monstrosity they wanted, despite
the Anti-Federalists’protests.
As we have seen, from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Bush/Obama,
and from the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA and police departments
all over America, the Constitution has been ignored time and again.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has observed,
the Constitution is itself "unconstitutional" in its multiple
self-contradictions.
What the Constitution
actually did was, instead of being a document whose rules and provisions
were to protect the rights and liberty of the individual,
it empowered a centralized, federal government to rule over
the masses, and gave such an institution monopoly powers. Those
monopoly powers go against the very core of the rights of the individual
and the individual’s freedom to choose amongst various competitors
in various industries, in health care, retirement planning, food
and nutrition, and many other areas.
19th
Century individualist Lysander Spooner observed
that the Constitution has "no inherent authority or obligation,"
and that the Constitution’s alleged contractual obligations are
to those who signed such a document, but not to others. (Members
of the "Supreme" Court need to read more Lysander Spooner
and less Barack Obama and Paul Krugman.)
Now, regarding
Obama’s SovietCare and
the idea of insurance mandates or government takeovers of the medical
care industry (which has been Obama’s
intention all along), Lew Rockwell noted that this socialized
medicine is really "subsidizing
sickness." To me, health insurance discourages people to
take care of themselves toward prevention of illnesses in the first
place. An insurance mandate orders people to not act preventatively,
and it implies that they should increase risky behaviors
and lifestyles.
Unfortunately,
rather than advocating personal responsibility and removing governmental
restrictions on our medical freedom, politicians such as FDR, LBJ,
Obama and Nancy Lugosi have gone the other way in diminishing
our medical freedom and becoming more and more intrusive in our
private personal matters.
But Hans-Hermann
Hoppe had this better four-step
solution to the health care situation in America:
- Eliminate
all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies,
and medical doctors and other health-care personnel. Their supply
would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater
variety of health-care services would appear on the market...
- Eliminate
all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical
products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug
Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases
costs...
- Deregulate
the health-insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance
against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control.
One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example,
because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about...
- Eliminate
all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more
of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased
promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate
such subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives
and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing
Medicare and Medicaid.
As Hoppe noted,
"only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully
free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry
will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers."
But, regardless
how the Supreme Bureaucrats decide, and in addition to our exercising
our right
to nullify federal dictates, the real solution to protecting
ourselves from clueless bureaucrats and their totalitarian medical
intrusions is this: DON’T GET SICK!
April
6, 2012
Scott
Lazarowitz [send him
mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his
blog.
Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
The
Best of Scott Lazarowitz
|